Dead Zero (21 page)

“It’s fabulous stuff, just what I’ve come to expect from you. You’re operating on a level way beyond what I’ve got. That’s your job. But I have to be practical and responsible. That’s my job. We have to collect, catalog, analyze evidence before we proceed to conclusions. We picked up some forensic markers. When the shooter slid through one
of the doors, he brushed it with his head, left sweat traces. We’ll run that, and then, maybe—”

“There’s only one conclusion. Well, two. You have a leak. And I’m an asshole for coming up with some bullshit thing that got nine guys killed for absolutely nothing.”

“You’re an asshole because that’s your nature. You can’t help that. All you hard macho door kickers and life takers are assholes. Your thinking was A-one, solid, deductive, top-of-the-line law enforcement creativity. I told you, you have the gift. Nothing wrong with it. Don’t hold it against yourself. As for the ‘leak’ stuff, the time element argues against it. We hadn’t even heard of this house until eight o’clock last night. The requests for subpoenas, the reports to higher headquarters, all that stuff didn’t go out until much later. If something did get out or if there was a mole, how’d the other team put it together so fast? Man, that would be footwork.”

“The team is here, all set, with all the tools of the trade. All they needed was an address.”

“I say again, not likely. Nobody’s that good. They had to follow us, know we’d left—”

“They couldn’t have followed us. We’d have seen them.”

“You yourself ‘felt’ something last night. You have the operator’s weird nerve system that’s unusually tuned to aggression. They had to follow us.”

“Okay, then. Satellite. That’s the only way. If it’s satellite, then it’s CIA. CIA wants Ray Cruz dead before he tells his story and a bunch of people are assigned to look into it. CIA wants Ibrahim Zarzi to be the next president of Afghanistan, no questions asked, forget all that ‘Beheader’ stuff. He’s our man in Kabul. And CIA will want to protect him, even if it means targeting our own guy.”

Nick ceased being Nick. Instead, he became an assistant director of the FBI, in full dignity and severity, posture improved, face drawn into upper-Bureau solemnity.

“I am not making accusations against the CIA,” he said in policy-announcement voice, “until we have something to go on other than
your theories. Going against the CIA means opening a big goddamn can of worms, and once the worms are out, you may never get them back in. We have to see where the evidence takes us. There aren’t any shortcuts.”

He looked at his watch and the old Nick came back.

“Come on, cowboy guy. We’re due on station downtown. In all this terrible bullshit, we’re forgetting: Ray Cruz is still out there.”

UNIDENTIFIED CONTRACTOR TEAM

JUST OUTSIDE THE SHOOT ZONE

THE 900 BLOCK OF MARYLAND AVENUE

MOUNT VERNON DISTRICT

BALTIMORE, MARYLAND

1650 HOURS

The boys had the blahs. They sat grumpily, without talking. Where was the banter, the wit, the snappy retorts, the fabulous esprit de corps of Special Forces operators? Wherever it was, it wasn’t here today.

Mick was in the off-driver’s seat, his big foot on the dashboard as he sat back against the seat. Man, he could use some shut-eye himself. This was, what, hour number forty-eight without sleep?

Crackers, in the backseat, said, “I am about to pass out.”

“If you do, I will kick your ass all the way to Washington. I need you on game, fully alert, concentrated. We don’t know what breaks next.”

“Easy for Superman to say. Superman has all the answers. Superman has no weaknesses, flaws, human foibles, neurotic conditions. But I am not Superman. I am Mere Mortal. And Mere Mortal needs to go to bed, sleep late, read the Sunday papers.”

“Drink some more coffee,” said Tony Z behind the wheel. The car was parked near a church with a red door and a steeple, one block west of Charles, that is, one block away from all the hubbub of the fabulous Ibrahim Zarzi’s visit to his brother’s restaurant, the Zabol, on Charles Street. From where they were—a block over, but with a parking lot’s emptiness granting a clear view of the shoot area—they could see the convoy of Secret Service Explorers parked in the street’s left lane, their blue-red gumball flashers spitting out blink-fast blasts of light, their windows darkened to hide the gunned-up agents just inside.
Meanwhile the street was cordoned off by Baltimore cops; Secret Service, FBI, and news aviation orbited noisily in the ether a few thousand feet up, cops and Bureau boys in raid jackets with big FBI letters, snail cords leading to their ear units, and tactical holsters pinioned to midthigh were up and down the street, looking this way and that.

“The coffee lost its charm sometime yesterday. Anyway, he’ll never get in,” said Crackers. “If he did, he’d never get out. Which means he’d never go in in the first place. So I say we hit a motel and crash for a thousand or so hours.”

“Swagger’s still on the case, so we’re on the case,” said Mick.

He held the BlackBerry, and on its screen, with the map of Mount Vernon glowing as its template, a pulsing light that signified Swagger’s transponder responding to interrogative requests from satellite, blinked away brightly. The guy was less than a quarter mile away.

“He’s another Superman,” said Crackers.

They were low because the victim list from last night’s episode had just been released. Nine names, none of them being Ray Cruz’s. Nine guys taken out, no home run. A complete waste of energy and lives. Not a good day in professional-killer land.

Tony flashed his big tactical Suunto and read the time.

“It’s almost five,” he said. “This party’s breaking up. Where do we go?”

“We’ll stay with Swagger. When he beds down, we’ll bed down. He’s still our best—”

The satellite phone buzzed.

“Oh shit,” said Mick. “Now this guy is going to crap all over me for ten minutes. Man, when this is over, I would like to . . .” And he trailed off as he wearily hoisted the heavy communication device.

“Talk to me,” he said.

“Genius Bogier. You’ve heard, I assume. You missed him again.”

“Yeah.”

“You killed nine men who had nothing to do with anything.”

“No kids, no women though,” said Mick. “No suffering. It’s not like we tortured them.”

“How reassuring. What a humanitarian you are. Now tell me your thought process.”

Bogier went through the whole thing.

He lamely finished up with, “Sometimes you get the breaks, sometimes you don’t. Last night, we didn’t.”

“A massacre. No one authorized you to massacre anybody. When this is over, I am getting you out of the country ASAP and I don’t want you back for twenty-five years.”

“Hey, there’s no forensics on us. No witnesses. The pistol’s in a river. No DNA, no hair samples, no footprints. We wore rubber gloves. We were clean, we were professional. Nothing leads to us from our end. Your end I don’t know about.”

“There was some DNA and I hope yours isn’t on file somewhere.”

“It isn’t.”

“Memo: you always leave DNA.
Always.
Got it? My end is secure, don’t you worry about it. What’s the sitrep now?”

“We are off the shoot zone, but still on Swagger, who’s put himself about a hundred feet north of the restaurant. He’s just another street pair of eyes, that’s all. But I don’t think Cruz is going to show because this place is flooded. He couldn’t get in, he couldn’t get out. We’re just waiting. When Swagger goes off duty, we need to crash. We’re on our third day without sleep, which isn’t helping matters any.”

“Good idea. And here’s a little something to improve your morale. Your decision? To hit those people. It was the right decision. It was a good risk. I don’t think it cost us anything. I’m sorry about the collateral too, but it’s a tough-luck world. As I say, after action, you are so gone no one will ever know you existed.”

“We want a beach, a gym, lots of chicks and dope, a really profoundly corrupt law enforcement establishment, and indoor plumbing.”

“You want
Gilligan’s Island
with porn stars. Really an original fantasy. I can’t guarantee the plumbing. You stay on Swagger, and we all believe he will lead you to—”

“Oh fuck,” interrupted Mick. “I hear shooting!”

THE SHOOT ZONE

THE 800 BLOCK OF NORTH CHARLES

MOUNT VERNON DISTRICT

BALTIMORE, MARYLAND

1654 HOURS

Getting him in was a bitch. Getting him out would be a bitch and a half because it took place after everyone had been standing around collecting blood in their feet for three grim hours.

Swagger felt like a ceremonial soldier at some state funeral for a distinguished old general. He stood, not at attention but in the uniform of the day—FBI raid jacket over shirt and tie, black cargo pants bloused into black tactical boots, a radio unit in his hand wired to his ear, along a street, doing nothing but yawning and watching. The only difference between him and the many other boys and girls thereabouts was the absence of a Glock .40 strapped to his thigh in a Nigel Ninja tac holster.

His sniper eyes darted about, looking for . . . well, what? A straight line where there shouldn’t be one? No, that bromide didn’t work in a city full of straight lines. The glint of sun off a lens? Cruz was too advanced for that. A figure on a skyline? A chopper would catch a rooftop shooter before any ground Joe would make the ID. A speeding black 1937 Cadillac with a Cutts compensator on a Colt tommy gun muzzle sticking out the back window? That made as much sense as anything else. He just watched, waited, looked around, eyes lighting on nothing, more or less committed to the single idea of movement, because if Ray Cruz moved, he’d move fast, and that might be the only way you could spot him, and then only if you happened to be looking at the small section of the universe through which he moved at the precise moment. But try as he could, he could not spot an uncovered area, that is, an area not already on someone’s regularly assigned observation schedule.

“Boring, huh?” said Nick, standing next to him.

“Not fun,” he said.

“I could use some sleep myself. I’m hoping to let everyone go when this guy—”

“BREAK-BREAK, ALL STATIONS, COMING OUT, COMING OUT!”

The Secret Service incident commander from inside the restaurant alerted all that the moment of maximum risk was about to occur, as the principal was about to move to the limo and would be on the street and vulnerable for a few seconds. If Ray was here, this was when he would act, unless he had an RPG capable of blowing through armored limo glass, unlikely.

Along the street, all the drifting watchers tightened up, reasserted control over their dozing nervous systems, put hands on pistols, blinked crud from eyes, went to balls of feet for a few minutes of maximum concentration. Above, the choppers came down a few hundred feet, their rotor wash stirring up flecks of grit from the rooftops they were putting the binocs to, all the Secret Service sniper teams in various designated windows locking hands to comb, cheeks to stock, eyes to scope for serious examination of their shooting areas.

Bob sensed, rather than saw, the flurry of motion as Zarzi, his brother, two children, and about ten Secret Service agents and bodyguards spilled from the restaurant in a sloppy formation, the two brothers chatting animatedly, as if none of this security drama were surrounding them. Ibrahim, of course, had to show off. He dawdled in plain sight, holding the hands of two of the younger children, laughing at old memories of childhood with his brother Asa. He refused to move, out of some polo athlete’s macho instinct by which he dared the universe to destroy him if it had the nerve, while around him the Secret Service people ground molars to powder, looked feverishly this way and that for signs of movement or action, saw only the pedestrian and the banal, the expected, the normal, the dreary: a homeless man far down one block, a flock of pigeons on the park lawn, a hip-looking
couple across the street, a garbage truck pulling out of an alley in the next block, a cab on a cross street, nothing to—

Bob thought:
Wrong. Something wrong. What is wrong with this picture? What is—

Jesus Christ,
in thoughts so fast they defied the words that tried to catch up with them,
what the fuck is that garbage truck doing there?

BACK ALLEY

JUST OFF THE SHOOT ZONE

THE 1300 BLOCK OF ST. PAUL STREET

MOUNT VERNON DISTRICT

BALTIMORE, MARYLAND

1558 HOURS

Romy Dawkins lifted the can to hoist it into 144’s dumper bin, and that’s when he saw him.

“Hey,” he called to Larry and Antwan, “hey, there’s a guy here.”

The man lay behind the row of cans, facedown, evidently passed out or dead.

Antwan came over, and then Larry climbed down from the cab. As crew supervisor and driver of the big truck, this was not welcome news. They still had half the route to go, there was some big traffic tie-up in the blocks ahead, and now they had to deal with a drunk.

“Fuck,” he said. “Kick ’im, see if it gets him up.”

Antwan drove a heavy boot into the figure, who groaned, stirred, then settled back.

“He’s out, boss,” said Antwan.

“Okay,” said Larry, “nothing we can do. I’ll call the cops, and we go on. We got a route to finish.”

“He could—”

“Let the cops worry about it,” said Larry. “It’s their job.”

At that point, the collapsed man rolled over. He held a dark automatic pistol in one hand.

“Okay,” he said, “I will hurt you if I have to, but that’s not the point. You do what I say, you get out clean. You fight me, you go home in a box.”

He was sort of Asian, semi-Asian you might say, with no accent whatsoever, very hard, sharp dark eyes and a demeanor that suggested he meant what he said. He connected with a lot of kung fu and
Hong Kong shoot-’em-ups most of the trashmen had seen on DVD. He looked like Chow Yun-Fat in
The Killer,
only for real and really pissed off.